Are NGOs Killing African Entrepreneurship?

I've heard complaints about NGO distortion of local economies before, but somehow, this one hits me particularly hard:

"Africans don't see a reward system in place for being
entrepreneurial. In fact, they view it as a matter of survival, not an
opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty. Rather, what they learn
at a very early age, is that in order to make good money, they should
learn to speak English incredibly well and then maybe, just maybe, they
can get a job driving for an NGO. In a few years, if they play their
cards right, they might be able to land an NGO job as a project manager
and even advance further."

Sammy's point was simply this. As a struggling businessman creating
new start-ups, he could not compete with what NGO's were paying for some
of the best and brightest. And even worse, he said, "by the time the
NGO's are done with them, there isn't an ounce of entrepreneur left."

Matt Rognlie's post on the topic implies that we should be following a minimalist approach to aid: focus on the things that we know really, actually work (think public health) and leave the rest alone.

I don't really know what to do with this. On the one hand, it's
terrible to think that aid is keeping economies from developing--and
this isn't the only such critique; there are also fears that aid acts
like a "resource curse", insulating political leaders from the need to
win public support for their spending, and breeding corruption. On the
other hand, I'm not sure I'm quite willing to walk up to a woman dying
from malnutrition to tell her that I'm sorry, we'd like to help, only
unfortunately it would distort the local economy and so I'm afraid
you'll need to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.

On the third hand, I'm conscious that in this scenario, I am biased
towards the seen harm, rather than the unseen--I'll never identify the
people who might have been pulled out of poverty if we hadn't screwed up
their economy, so my tendency is to discount them.

Aid is the most depressing topic in economics. I don't know how William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs stand it.

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